Music icon dies: Joni Sledge, who soared to fame with her three sisters with the hit “We Are Family,” was found dead in her Phoenix home on Friday. She was 60.
Music icon Joni Sledge was found dead Friday in her Phoenix home. Sledge and her sisters are most known for their song “We Are Family.”
Sledge, 60, was found in her home by a friend on Friday, the band’s publicist, Biff Warren, told the Associated Press on Saturday. A cause of death has not been determined.
The family announced the news on their Facebook page Saturday night: “Yesterday, numbness fell upon our family. We are saddened to inform you that our dear sister, mother, aunt, niece and cousin, Joni passed away yesterday. Please pray for us as we weep for this loss. We do know that she is now eternally with Our Lord ... We miss her and hurt for her presence, her radiance, and the sincerity with which she loved & embraced life.”
Sledge and her sisters Debbie, Kim and Kathy formed the band Sister Sledge in 1971. Debbie, Kim and Joni continued to perform together. Concerts were scheduled over the next several months around the U.S. and internationally.
“The four of us had been in the music business for eight years and we were frustrated. We were saying: ‘Well, maybe we should go to college and just become lawyers or something other than music, because it really is tough,’ ” Joni told the Guardian newspaper in an interview last year.
But then they met Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers of the hit group Chic, and their breakout soon came. The pair wrote and produced their album “We Are Family,” and soon the women had their first major hit with disco jam “The Greatest Dancer,” which became a top 10 hit in May 1979. (It would be sampled years later for Will Smith’s hit “Getting Jiggy Wit It.”)
But their biggest hit would come a month later with the title track, an infectious dance anthem that celebrated their familial connection with the refrain, “We are family, I got all my sisters with me.”
While it celebrated their sisterhood, the 1979 hit also became an anthem for female empowerment and unity. It would become their signature hit, and was nominated for a Grammy. Both the song and album sold more than 1 million copies.
The women also had a hit with a cover of the Mary Wells song “My Guy” in 1982, but would never duplicate the success they had in the 1970s. Still, Sister Sledge continued; while sister Kathy left the group for a solo career, the trio of sisters continued to perform and record, including a performance for Pope Francis in 2015.
Warren said they last performed together in concert in October.
Joni Sledge is survived by an adult son, her sisters and other relatives.